Dele Ogbodo in Abuja
A former President of African University of Science and Technology (AUST) and Professor of Mechanical and Aesrospace Engineering at Princeton University, United States of America (USA), Mr. Wole Soboyejo, on Monday said the World Bank, in collaboration with AUST, has developed a new digital teaching template for the teaching of Mathematics and Science in primary school pupils in Nigeria and 14 other sub-Sahara Africa countries before the end of the year.
The University don, made the disclosure at the 2nd annual Pan Africa School of Materials (PASMAT) workshop of the Pan African Materails Institute in Abuja.
He said: “There is a programme that we have started with the World Bank which focuses on primary education on Mathematics and Science and it is called the Mathematics and Science for sub-Saharan Africa programme.”
According to him, the new template will address the problems encountered by pupils and teachers in Mathematics and other basic sciences, adding that the idea behind it is that it is to take all of the materials from the kindergarten to senior high school and provide them in digital form so that they can be accessed by schools from all over Africa.
He said AUST will ensure that the project is properly accessed through training of teachers in different African countries who will then train the teachers to use that materials for the pupils in Maths and Science.
The University Don assured that this task is for him the next frontier in curricula development in Africa. He stressed that much of what has been done in the past is the top to bottom approach, adding: “Now we realise that we need to come from the base and we are working with people from Singapore, China and India
“We are hoping to have a launch before the end of the year for the system and the idea is to make it freely available to another to anybody that wants to have access to it and make it freely available and I’m happy to tell you that Nigeria is one of the countries that is interested and other 14 African countries that have expressed interest in this and this will be for the next 10 years.”
Further details later
